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Here comes a big, ‘glorious’ piece of choral music

By Bob Keefer

The Register-Guard

Appeared in print: Thursday, Feb. 25, 2010, page D1

Johannes Brahms’ German Requiem is one of the touchstones of choral performance.

The piece is big, it’s sprawling, it’s romantic and it’s luscious. The composer used text in German, rather than the traditional Latin of the requiem Mass, as a reflection of his focus on humanity over grandeur.

The Eugene Concert Choir has done the Brahms Requiem twice before in the past 25 years under the baton of artistic director Diane Retallack.

This weekend, the choir — aided by an orchestra from the Oregon Mozart Players — will perform the Requiem once again in a single show at the Hult Center on Saturday night.

“It is one of the most glorious pieces of music ever written,” Retallack says. “It’s a reason to live.”

The first time she had the choir perform the piece, the singers used an English translation of text. That seemed appropriate at the time, Retallack says.

“This is a ‘German Requiem,’ specifically written in German, because Brahms wrote for the people to understand,” she says. “In that spirit I used an English translation, which was a very good translation. But nothing can really reproduce the sounds like the original language.”

The choir’s second performance of the work was in German, as will be Saturday’s show.

“By the second time we performed it I had studied more German and was very excited to be able to understand exactly what was being sung in another language,” Retallack says.

The Requiem is not a traditional Mass. There is no Kyrie, for example, and no Gloria.

Instead, Brahms chose biblical texts for the work’s seven movements, beginning with the text “Selig sind, die da Leid tragen (Blessed are they that mourn)” in the first movement and then looping back, in the seventh movement, to “Selig sing die Toten (Blessed are the dead),” set to the same music in the final movement. “It comes full circle,” she says.

And while the texts are Christian in origin, it’s clear the work was aimed at people of any faith. “What is significant about this Requiem Mass particularly is that Brahms specifically avoided naming Jesus Christ,” Retallack says. “He considered it a human requiem for all faiths. There are words of Christ in the requiem. And there is a baritone soloist. But the words of Christ are not sung by the baritone. They are sung by the soprano.”